Jackson's comments, commiserations, confabulations and simplifications on identity management and Microsoft's Active Directory all based on his continuous "reality tour" of meetings with customers, ISVs and Microsoft.

Thursday, September 27, 2007

Microsoft's Enterprise Engineering Center

Where do you go when you want to do scalability testing for a product that is used by hundreds of customers to recovery Active Directory domain controllers and whole forests? You head over to building 25 on Microsoft's main campus to the Enterprise Engineering Center (EEC)!

We just finished up three full weeks of testing Quest's Recovery Manager Forest Edition in the EEC. We had 4 fully loaded, extremely high-end Dell servers with a back end multi-terabyte SAN to support nearly 450 domain controllers split up across 8 virtual servers.

We managed the whole thing with Microsoft's new System Center Virtual Machine Manager and monitored everything with Spotlight on Active Directory. The Microsoft AD team was so impressed with the setup that they are taking over the EEC to do Windows Server 2008 testing based on our environment. Nice!

We might be back to the EEC pretty soon to do scalability testing of Active Directory to 75 million users - yup, 75 million users - for a government customer that wants to see it with their own eyes. More on this later if it happens...

p.s. Thanks to Microsoft and the folks in the EEC who all pitched in to help us - you guys rock!

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